Waiting for God to Act

Jeremiah lamenting the destruction of Jerusalem

Advent is for waiting. As we tell the story of redemption through the church calendar we begin our telling of the sacred story, not with doing, not with celebrating, but with waiting — waiting for God to act.

Yet most of us — children of a high-tech, high-speed, instantaneous age — are not very good at waiting. It feels too much like doing nothing, and we are the driven ones who take pride in being busy. Waiting is not really our thing.

Or worse yet, waiting feels too much like lamenting, which is closer to the truth. With the loss of a strong sense of the Christian calendar we have conflated Advent and Christmas into a single “holiday season.” But the truth is that Advent is quite different from Christmas as it carries its strong theme of prophetic lament. The world has gone wrong, justice lies fallen in the streets, and it seems that God is nowhere to be found. That’s when the lamentation of waiting arises in our soul: “O Lord, how long?” From Isaiah to Malachi there is a consistent theme of waiting in lament for God to act. All of the Hebrew prophets, each in their own way, composed their prophetic poems around this recurring theme: The Lord is coming, God is about to act, but for now…we wait.

And yet the waiting is essential. For it’s in the waiting that our soul grows quiet and contemplative and cultivates a capacity for awareness by which we can discern what God is doing when he does act.

 We have been seduced by an idolatry that deceives us into thinking that God is mostly found in the big and loud, when in fact, God is almost never found in the big and loud. The ways of God are predominantly small and quiet. The ways of God are about as loud as seed falling on the ground or bread rising in an oven. The ways of God are almost never found in the shouts of the crowd; the ways of God are more often found in trickling tears and whispered prayers. We want God to do a big thing, while God is planning to do a small thing. We are impressed by the big and loud. God is not. We are in a hurry. God is not. We want God to act fast, but Godspeed is almost always slow.

So we are waiting for God to act, but I would suggest that we are not so much waiting for God to act as we are waiting to become contemplative enough to discern what God is doing. God is always acting, because God is always loving his creation. The Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are always inviting us into their house of love. But when we are consumed by anger, harried by anxiety, and driven by impatience, we are blind and deaf to what God is actually doing in the present moment.

When God broke into history decisively through the Incarnation, who discerned it? Not the Pharisees whose religious movement was loudly predicting that God was about to act. Not the scribes and priests who were the professional experts in prophetic scripture. Instead it was pagan stargazers and peasant shepherds who discerned what God was doing. They were not the experts and they were not the reactionaries at the loud center of religious noise; they were quiet people on the silent edges of contemplative thought.

Gazing at stars and keeping watch by night are profound metaphors for the contemplative life. To most people it would appear that the Magi and the shepherds were doing nothing of significance in their long nighttime vigils, but they were the ones who were able to discern what God was doing. It was contemplative stargazers and shepherds, having learned how to wait in silence, who found their way to Bethlehem. They were the ones who discerned what God was doing in the seemingly ordinary event of a young woman giving birth in an out of the way place.

Waiting for God to act only seems like waiting for God to act. God is always acting because God is always loving the world and always giving birth to something. Waiting for God to act is actually waiting for your soul to become quiet enough and contemplative enough to discern what God is doing in the obscure and forgotten corners, far from the corridors of power or wherever you think the action is.

We want God to act in the imperial capital of Rome, but God first acts in a stable on the edge of Bethlehem.

We want God to act in Washington D.C., but God first acts in the quiet corner of your own living room.

So let me say this to you quite confidently: God is about to act. God is about to act in your life and in our world. But if you want to discern the actions of God you must learn to first wait in quiet contemplation. Before you can become an activist, you must first become a contemplative; otherwise you’ll just be a re-activist. And re-activists merely recycle anger and keep the world an angry place. Jesus was a contemplative activist, but never a re-activist.

So learn to gaze at the stars. Learn to keep vigil in the fields. Learn to sit with Jesus. Learn to be quiet. Learn to wait. Then, and only then, will you begin to discern what God is doing.

May this Advent help prepare you to discern what God is about to do in your life and in our world.

Waiting for God to Act
Brian Zahnd

That Problem You’re Facing Right Now

The Lord will not always rescue you when you want Him to. And He certainly will not act according to your timetable every time.

In fact, sometimes He will let you die (metaphorically speaking). He may even wait until you’re quadruply dead and stinking in your tomb before He does anything (think Lazarus).

So when things become black in your life, and there seems to be no way out, your situation has the fingerprints of Jesus Christ all over it.

Chisel it in stone: you can’t have a resurrection without a death. Resurrection is God’s act alone. And that’s why it always brings glory to Him.

Two things to remember during your trial: 1) the Lord is seeking to show you something new about Himself and 2) the lesson you learn is not just for yourself. It’s given to you to help others.

So lean hard on your Lord. Trust Him, yielding, waiting, and seeking, expecting your resurrection. And in time, it will surely come.

A Tremendous Truth

In the death of Christ, we died. True?
Just as we cannot have salvation if we do not see that
He bore our sins on the Cross, so we cannot have
sanctification if we have not seen Him bearing us on
the Cross.

How did you receive forgiveness? You realized that
the Lord Jesus died as your substitute and that He
bore your sins away. Do you not praise and thank
Him for saving you? In the same way that we
received salvation, we receive sanctification--by
faith. Thus there is no need to pray, "I am a very
wicked person. Lord, please crucify me! That is all
wrong. Just as your sins were dealt with by His
blood, you were dealt with by His Cross. It is an
accomplished fact. All that is left for you to do is to
praise the Lord that when He died, you died also.

Christ died for us. (Romans 5:8)
Our old man was crucified with Him (Romans 6:6)
We died with Christ. (Romans 6:8)

What died with Christ? Our old man died.

When Christ died, YOU died. You are done with.
You are ruled out. The self you loathe is on the
Cross in Christ. And, 'he that is dead is freed
from sin. (Rom 6:7) This is the Gospel for the
Christian!

Man's way is to try to suppress sin by seeking to
overcome it; God's way is to remove the sinner.
If we are preoccupied with the power of sin and
with our inability to overcome it, then we
naturally conclude that to gain victory over sin,
we must have more power. So we plead with God
to strengthen us that we may have more self-control.

But this is not Christianity. God's means of setting
us free from sin, is to make us weaker. God set us
free from the dominion of sin, not by strengthening
the old man, by by crucifying him. The discovery
of your helplessness and His victory will bring an
end to human striving, self hate and self-effort.
(Watchman Nee, The Normal Christian Life)

Problem Solved

This is probably one of the most significant posts
you will read on this site. It was taught by the
clergy in the 19th and 20th centuries, but I have
not come across it much in more recent years.

"For as by one man's disobedience the many
were made sinners, so by the one man's
obedience, the many will be made righteous.
(Romans 5:19)

Our despair is in Adam; our hope is in Christ.

But, here is the problem. Seeing that we were born
in Adam, how can we get out of Adam? The blood
doesn't cut it. There is only one way. Since we
came into Adam by birth, we must go out of Adam
by death. To do away with our sinfulness we must
do away with our life. What? Yes! Bondage to sin
came by birth; deliverance from sin comes by death--
His death. God has dealt with us in Christ. If this is
so, how do we get into Christ? Good question. God
has put us into Christ. I Corinthians 1:30 states
this very clearly:

"Of Him (that is of God) are ye in Christ."
We are in so we don't have to try to get in.

The Lord God Himself put us into Christ
Our destiny is bound up in His destiny
What He has gone through, we have also.
When Christ was crucified we were crucified
When Christ was buried we were buried
When Christ rose from the dead, we rose too.
(See Romans 6)

All references to crucifixion in the NT are in the
Greek aorist tense. "the eternally past tense, the
once for all tense'

"We know that our old man was crucified
with him in order that the body of sin might
be brought to nothing, so that we would no
longer be enslaved to sin.
'  (Romans 6:6)

"I have been crucified with Christ. It is no
longer I who live, but Christ who lives in
me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live
by the faith of the Son of God, who loved
me and gave himself for me."
(Galatians 2:20)

"But far be it from me to boast except in the
cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by which
the world has been crucified to me, and I to
the World."  (Galatians 6:14)

NOT Our Behaviour

"What has nothing to do with my behavior? When
we know the precious truth of justification by faith,
we still know only half the story. We have only
solved the problem of our standing before God.
How can we live the normal Christian life? How
do we enter into it? We not only need to be right
with God but we also need peace with God. The
Blood can wash away my sins, but it cannot wash
away my 'old man.' The 'old nature' needs
crucifixion. The Blood deals with the sins but the
cross must deal with the sinner. Paul lays it out in
Romans five: 'A sinner is said to be a sinner
because he is born a sinner; not because he com-
mits sins.' Why am I a born a sinner? Because
Adam sinned and we are all descended from
Adam.

'Sin came into the world through one man so
death spread to all men...through one man's
trespass, death reigned through that one man.'
(Romans 5)

If your great grandfather had died at the age of
three, where would you be today? Well, you
would not be here because you would have died
in him. In the same way we are bound to Adam.
We are all involved in Adam's sin, because we
are all from him. When Adam sinned we received
from him all that he became as a result of his sin--
that is to say, the Adam-nature, the nature of a
sinner. Our trouble is in what we have inherited,
not our behavior. Unless we change our heritage
there is no room for deliverance for us."
Watchman Nee paraphrase

Reader, I am going to leave you half baked, so to
speak. I am on the edge of a wonderful break-
through but it is so much to grasp all at once,
especially if it is new to you.  Know that you have
been reconciled with God through the Blood of
Jesus, but that there is so much more to salvation--
there is also deliverance!

Communicating Feelings

Search me, O God, and know my heart; test me and know my anxious thoughts. See if there is any offensive way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting. --Psalm 139: 23, 24


Very few couples ever learn to communicate on the important level of how they feel.Most people live out of feelings, which should be communicated even if they are not based on fact.However, when beginning to describe how they feel, people often get bombarded with facts from their spouses intended to discredit what was said. It is interesting to watch the confrontation of a carnal person. First, he tries denial:  "I did not do it!" Second, there is the rationalization of his/her behavior: "I had to do it." Then comes the accusation: "You made me do it," or, "You have done the same thing yourself." None of this makes for great conversation that goes anywhere. The spiritual man does none of the above when confronted, neither immediately accepting (unless conviction from God previously existed) nor immediately rejecting the claims, but laying his heart before God and letting God probe. If what was said is true, then there is repentance.

           
Let others tell you how they feel. You may be hearing only false feelings, but a spiritual response from you will help reveal this. Get in the other person’s shoes and understand the feelings and why they might be occurring, without responding in a manner calculated to defend yourself. This will help both of you move past those feelings to the Truth, Christ.


Psalm 139:23-24 are a testimony of the great King David’s understanding of himself versus God’s knowledge of him.  And one thing that shows is that O.T. Believers did not possess the Holy Spirit’s indwelling…therefore the “uh-huh” and “unh-uh” He gives today’s Believers were not available to David.  So David would wisely ask God to reveal and lead him as needed.  Today, we have HIM inside us to do such, most often whether we ask or not, although it is never “bad” to ask God for His wisdom, His insights, His awareness of any of our “offensive ways,” and His leadership.


Michael shows us this translates to the disaster of carnal Christians not being able to (or, not wanting to) communicate their feelings when a sensitivity to the Holy Spirit’s nudging (and desire to walk with His involvement) could lead to less tension and better communication.


Interestingly, the Greek word for “communicate” in the New Testament is koinoneo, meaning “share with.”  Exactly what Michael is saying here!  Share with each other our feelings, not just facts.  And especially not arguments!

Our Dual Problem

Our dual problem: SINS AND SIN

'The first eight chapters of Romans form a self-
contained unit. Chapters one to chapter 5:11 form
the first half, chapters 5:12 to 8:19 lays out the
second half. In the first section we find that Paul
uses the plural form and refers to sins. In the
second section, however, this is changed, for
while the word 'sins' hardly occurs once, the
singular word 'sin' is used again and again. Why?'

'It is because in the first section it is a question
of the many sins I have committed before God,
whereas in the second it is a question of sin as a
principle working within. It is this sin-principle
that leads to our sinning. I need forgiveness for
my sins, but I need also deliverance from the
power of sin. The former touches my conscience,
the latter, my life...Once I have received
forgiveness of sins I make a new discovery,
namely the discovery of 'sin'--something is still
wrong within...'

'We shall see that the Blood deals with what we
have done, whereas the Cross deals with what
we are. The Blood disposes of our sins, while the
Cross strikes at the root of our capacity for sin.'
(Watchman Nee, somewhat paraphrased)

Reader, the words above were what began my
journey to living in greater victory. If you can
grasp the difference between sins and sin, you
are on your way to freedom in Christ! I will
expand on this in the coming days.